


Yellow and White

by Elvendork



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: M/M, Strexcorp
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-30
Updated: 2014-07-30
Packaged: 2018-02-11 01:46:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2048634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elvendork/pseuds/Elvendork
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The colour of Cecil's fear has changed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Yellow and White

**Author's Note:**

> Umm... I'm not really sure what this is. If you've read my other WTNV fics, you will have noticed that "my" Cecil has hair, eyes, and tattoos which all change colour with his mood. This started as me kind of developing that for myself, and then... grew.
> 
> I do not own WTNV. There are a huge variety of headcanon Cecils that I love (along with the fact that there _is_ variety), but I do like developing my own. Yes, the title is deliberately similar to my other fic "Purple and Gold" - I actually wrote this immediately after that, but I've been debating whether to upload it or not. I decided I might as well.

Over the last two years, Carlos has become something of an expert in reading Cecil’s features. Not just in the typical sense of understanding his quirks of expression, his smiles or frowns or his tiniest glances (although that too), but in the sense of understanding his _colours_. His hair, eyes, and tattoos all have a chameleon-like tendency to change colour according to his mood.

His hair is the least mutable of the three, but capable of changing in an instant if the occasion calls for it. The changes of his eyes are smoother, more gradual than his tattoos, but more immediately reactive than his hair. His tattoos are a constantly shifting panorama of every shade and hue imaginable, washing across them sometimes in great sweeping motions like the passage of clouds and sometimes in bright flashes like lightning strikes.

None of the changes, as far as Carlos is aware, are consciously controlled by Cecil. It took a long time for Carlos to both observe and accept that they were happening at all, and even longer to begin finding the patterns (although he had started looking straight away). He thinks he understands them as well as anyone ever could now, and it gives him a curious thrill to be privy to such information – so publicly broadcast and yet so personal as to require a great deal of intimacy to properly comprehend. Most of Cecil’s acquaintances (which covers most of the town) would be able to interpret the crudest of the representations, but it is not as simple as “colour X equals emotion Y”, and it takes a more practised eye to understand all of the subtleties involved. It is not helped by the fact that the three seem to abide by slightly different rules. His eyes and hair use simpler palettes with fewer and sometimes altogether contradictory colours to his tattoos.

Purple and gold, Carlos has come to learn, are most commonly associated with love and happiness. (They are both so often in evidence around him that he had at first taken them for something of a default state. He blushes to think of it even now.) The different shades and combinations are capable of displaying the most minor of changes, the most intricate of patterns. As a general though not exhaustive rule the deeper the colours, the more intense the emotions. Paler colours can indicate shallower, more fleeting feeling, or hesitation, often brought about by embarrassment. This latter is usually accompanied by a tinge of pink, although this is difficult to interpret; pink has many potential meanings depending on the shade, it being so close to both red and purple. Red can mean anger or passion or joy – it is more suited to an indicator of the _power_ of the emotion than the root cause.

Black is perhaps the most difficult to follow, especially as it seems to be the natural resting state of both his tattoos and his hair. It can mean contentment, in which case the black shines like ink and is rarely solid, but chased through with veins of gold or earthy brown. It can mean apathy, although Cecil is hardly ever apathetic about anything. It can mean exhaustion or even depression, and in these cases is usually dull, verging on a sort of dusty dark grey tainted with deep bruise-blue. Blue itself is complex as well, and almost impossible to read in isolation; it can mean anything from the bright cerulean of freshness and energy (often accompanied by mint green) to the deepest navy of the heaviest sadness. Green can mean envy or mischief or triumph or any number of other things.

White is the only one, in Carlos’s experience, which has an entirely consistent meaning across all three of tattoos, hair, and eyes. It is the only colour which has only one single meaning when in isolation, although even it can be modified by combination with others.

White, almost universally, means fear. Not the fear of embarrassment, not the fear of first date nerves or tongue-tied uncertainty; not even the constant undercurrent of uncertainty induced by the everyday events of Night Vale.  It is deep, bone chilling, worried for your very life _terror_. In over a year of knowing Cecil, Carlos only sees it traced in threads across the lines of his tattoos, emerging at the roots of only a handful of hairs – and never in his eyes. It is not until around two months after their first date that Carlos sees – and the sight fills him with nauseating horror – all three of Cecil’s chameleon-like features washed in solid, unbroken white. Eyes, hair, and tattoos are all stark and blank, unrelenting even when Cecil lays eyes on him (and never, _never_ before has purple failed to make an appearance at this point).

It is the day the yellow helicopters arrive.

It is the first, but not the last, time that Carlos is witness to his boyfriend in such a state of absolute terror.

It is the first and the last time he is witness to such a feeling being represented only by _white_.

By the time of the ill-fated auction (and Carlos feels sick to remember it), the colour of Cecil’s fear has changed. Once more his hair, eyes, and tattoos are all in a rare moment of complete unison.

They are all yellow.  
 


End file.
